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Monday, March 27, 2017

Republicans rolling back the regs

Robert Reich rolled out the latest Media-Democratic Party Complex lie in a piece in Newsweek, "Republicans Can’t Govern and Don’t Want to."

Meanwhile, President Trump just signed the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh Congressional Review Act resolutions into law -- rolling back four more sets of regulations rushed through in the Final Days of the Obama regime.

Until Trump became president, the law had reversed federal regulations only once in its 20-year history.

So much for congressional oversight.

But Trump is leading Republicans to reverse the polarity of our Bureaucratic Overlords.

That Congressional Review Act -- a creation of Newt Gingrich when he was House speaker -- is the second-best way to stop the bureaucracy from writing laws.

The best way would be to require full congressional approval -- complete with committee hearings -- before the regulations become law.

Trump has been using executive orders to tie the hands of rule makers. He put in place a regulatory freeze during his first hours, mandated that two regulations be repealed for every new one that goes on the books and ordered a top-to-bottom review of the government with an eye toward shrinking it.

Any day now, Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at undoing Obama's Clean Power Plan and end a moratorium on federal-land coal mining. This would ensure that the U.S. does not meet its commitments under the Paris climate agreement.

The administration is also preparing new executive orders to re-examine all 14 U.S. free trade agreements, including NAFTA, and the president could start to sign some of them this week.

Trump plans to unveil a new White House office on Monday with sweeping authority to overhaul the federal bureaucracyand, potentially, privatize some government functions. "The Office of American Innovation, to be led by Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, will operate as its own nimble power center within the West Wing and will report directly to Trump," Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker report.

"Viewed internally as a SWAT team of strategic consultants, the office will be staffed by former business executives and is designed to . . . create a lasting legacy for a president still searching for signature achievements. . . . Kushner's team is being formalized just as the Trump administration is proposing sweeping budget cuts across many departments, and members said they would help find efficiencies."

Kushner's ambitions are grand: "At least to start, the team plans to focus its attention on re-imagining Veterans Affairs; modernizing the technology and data infrastructure of every federal department and agency; remodeling workforce-training programs; and developing 'transformative projects' under the banner of Trump's $1 trillion infrastructure plan, such as providing broadband Internet service to every American. In some cases, the office could direct that government functions be privatized, or that existing contracts be awarded to new bidders."

Let us put Reich's false narrative in perspective. In my 63-plus years, Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for 16 of those years.

Trump has now signed a total of seven, a pace that has surprised even experts. "There are several that weren't on my radar at all," said Susan Dudley, director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University.

Previous bills have reversed Obama regulations banning Social Security recipients with a mental impairment from buying a firearm, restricting the dumping of mining waste in streams and rivers, and requiring energy companies to disclose how much they're paying foreign governments.

In fact, now half of all bills Trump has signed so far have been these regulation-killing resolutions. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday many of the bills "cancel federal power grabs that took decision-making away from the states and local governments."

Best of all, there is this from USA Today:

Trump's action effectively precludes federal action on any of those rules, since the administration is now barred from issuing any new rule that is "substantially similar" to the ones that were just overturned.

11 comments:

What this does is move the Overton Window more than anyone dared dream and when, not if, IdiotCare is repealed and a Federal entitlement is abolished, I think it fair to say the power of the Deep State will be on life support.

This is a real good idea. It strikes me as even better than requiring bureaucratic regulations to wait for Congressional approval in every case because this would still guarantee a Congressional vote, which really needs to start happening, but allows the bureaucrats to do their job as they have been and to modify regulations as they are put in practice and enforced (based on the classical ideal of non-partisan bureaucracy, which might return with checks and balances in place that the partisans know they are going to have to face) -- and then Congress gets to look at it and vote on it as is (not as each side predicts).

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I live in Poca, West Virginia, with my lovely wife of 39 years, Lou Ann. I am an Army veteran and Cleveland State graduate. I retired after 40 years as a newspaperman. In 2016, I published "Trump the Press," which drew rave reviews at Power Line and Instapundit.